This is a writing sample by “nycghostwriter,” AKA Barbara Finkelstein. It is “Why not try face-to-face conversation for a change,” a blog post originally published on the IBM Researcher platform on August 7, 2019. You can get professional ghostwriting services from a published blogger. Email me or fill out the short form on my contact page.
Just so we’re clear, I’m not a Luddite. Aside from having worked in IBM and IBM Research communications as an employee or contractor since 2000, I personally own a Mac and PC, an Amazon Fire tablet, a Kindle (my second one), a Samsung smart TV and a Google Pixel phone. I have profile pages on Researcher, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and several sharing sites (Instagram, Pinterest) I use on occasion. I have subscriptions to Netflix and Amazon Prime and several newspapers no longer available in print. I am a long-time denizen of the digital world and have experienced computing on everything from a DOS screen to a smartphone app.
Yet I exaggerate only a little when I say that all of these communications platforms, taken singly or all together, do not hold a candle to face-to-face conversation.
Digital and online communications are perfect for avoiding human contact. Case in point: I recently saw a guy in the Yorktown cafeteria I once went out of my way to help with his Researcher web page. Based on my belief that person-to-person interaction is more effective than email or Sametime, I stopped by his office. He yelled at me for wasting his time. Okay, grumpy old men ye shall always have with you. For them digital is the Holy Grail.
True, Skype, Facetime, Zoom and other inexpensive video chat programs facilitate face-to-face contact that simply wasn’t available when I first came to IBM. Thanks to these sci-fi-like technologies, I have talked to people from Libya, Shanghai, Sydney, Haifa and scores of other cities that would have been names in my old World Book Encyclopedia without the invention of digital.
Yet none of these options is superior to talking with a colleague or friend in person. The potential for misunderstanding, a given for every digital communications platform, is a non-issue when you can observe the non-verbal cues so much a part of real-world communications. Emoticons came into being to fill in the nuance and emotion that email and texting lack, but even the least offensive of them somehow comes off as snarky.
Maybe the most important bygone benefit of person-to-person conversation is the serendipitous encounter.
You might remember going to a library or bookstore, wandering around stacks and shelves and stumbling upon a book that changed your life. That’s how I found Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search For Meaning and an arcane little travel memoir by Robert Louis Stevenson called Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes. Hanging out at the office water cooler once served the same serendipitous function: You run into Val who works on some other team and whose office is at the end of the corridor. It turns out you’re both interested in serverless technology. You might even have known about Val because you clicked on the “Related People” button on Researcher. But suddenly, without having to search, you are on a ready-made “platform” that inspires questions, answers and future plans.
Social science researchers are still studying serendipity. As social researcher Jason Owen-Smith has observed, “Bumping into people enables you to to come into contact with information or resources you wouldn’t otherwise think to seek out. The people you bump into may know stuff that is useful to you that you don’t know would be useful to you, and you may learn it in the course of these [serendipitous] interactions.”
Owen-Smith observes further that “to spur innovation that is unexpected, you need some form of physical proximity. Because virtual work — to the best of my knowledge — does not yet have mechanisms that allow you to come to realize that someone you don’t have a reason to talk to knows something you need to know.”
The jury might still be out on the advantages of serendipitous encounters. But you can’t help but wonder: How much could my research profit from an insight outside my own Sametime list? My own LinkedIn connections? My own Slack channel?
You can read this post on Brook’s Blog, a project of IBM Research.
